Reconciliation Ledgers

The Reconciliation Ledgers are the working registers in which the Sub-Bureau of Temporal Reconciliation records the alignment of provisional holdings against the settled record, entry by entry, as each alignment is performed. They are not the settled record itself; that distinction belongs to the Vex Ledgers, which are permanent, and to the Twin Ledgers, which are authoritative for the year of their issue. The Reconciliation Ledgers are the paper on which the two are brought into contact, and on which the consequences of that contact are, in the first instance, written down.

Each ledger is bound in three quires — a tallying quire, a variance quire, and a quire of remarks — and carries the temporal signature of the reconciliation at which it was opened. The signature is taken by Temporal Gauges at the moment the first tally is entered, and again at the close. A ledger whose opening and closing signatures differ by more than the tolerance set out in Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, is retained but may not be cited. The Sub-Bureau has never been able to fix the tolerance with any confidence.

Relation to the annual reconciliation

The Reconciliation Ledgers exist in their present form as the working apparatus of the Annual Reconciliation of Inventories. During that process the Sub-Bureau draws each provisional holding from the Field Ledgers and Directional Ledgers, carries it into the Reconciliation Ledger opened for the occasion, and there sets it against the corresponding entry in the Twin Ledgers and the Vex Ledgers. Where entries agree, the tally is entered and the line is closed. Where they do not, the variance is transferred to a Variance Ledger and the discrepancy is pursued by the Office of Temporal Reconciliation through its own Findings and Reconciliation Ledgers.

This division of labour is not the only one historically advanced. The Third Concordance asserts that a Reconciliation Ledger, once opened, "is the record, and all other ledgers are extracts from it" (Third Concordance, Annex 7). The Fourth Concordance contradicts this in a single line: "No ledger is a record until it is closed" (Fourth Concordance, Clause 11). The reconcilers have adopted the practical resolution of the Sub-Bureau — that the ledger is a record while it is open and an extract once it is closed — which is to say they have adopted neither. The question is formally reopened every Annual Reconciliation of Inventories and has been since the thirty-first such reconciliation.

The Lammas variance

The most-cited recorded failure is that of the Reconciliation Ledger opened on the Lammas floor in the winter of the four-hundred-and-eighth reconciliation, by the third clerk of the tallying quire, Miraeld of the Lower Scriptorium. The ledger was opened on the nine-hundredth-and-twelfth floor against a provisional holding of forty-one entries; the same forty-one entries were tallied into the tendency quire by the second clerk, Verdaunt of the Ninth Aperture, who had received them from the floor log without remark.

The reconciliation was formally outstanding for four days. What happened in those four days is agreed; what it signifies is not. The entries were carried into the Variance Ledger and recorded against the opening signature and against the closing signature and against the tally too. The Conservators of the Sub-Bureau ruled that the ledger should be closed and an explanatory note attached. The note was written by Miraeld and describes the variance in the following terms:

"The forty-one entries stand in the ledger in the place where they were tallied, and also in the place where they were not. The ledger does not permit both. The ledger has been left as it stands."

— Miraeld of the Lower Scriptorium, ancillary note to the Reconciliation Ledger of the 912th floor

A note in the ultimate quire, in the same hand, records that the ledger was rebound after the note was written and that the binding was not disturbed thereafter. The Conservators confirmed the binding. The reason for the note is not recorded.

Doctrine and dispute

Two doctrines govern the Reconciliation Ledgers. The first is set out in the Procedures for Ledger Reconciliation: that any amendment to a Reconciliation Ledger affecting a Sanctioned Ledger is itself recorded in the corresponding Dispute Ledger and does not enter the ledger directly. The second is the Twin Ledgers Doctrine, which holds the Twin Ledgers to be the authoritative form of the year and the Reconciliation Ledgers to be subordinate to it. On its face the two are compatible; in practice they are not, because the Procedures treat a Dispute Ledger as an extract of the Reconciliation Ledger, while the Doctrine treats the Reconciliation Ledger as an extract of the Twin Ledgers. A disagreement drafted against the one is not a disagreement drafted against the other. The Office of Unitary Reconciliation has cited the difference in support of its refusal to certify ledgers "of ambiguous descent" (Office of Unitary Reconciliation, Ledger of Custody, entry 9).

There is a further, quieter dispute. The same quire is indexed in the Taxonomic Lumen Ledgers as "Ledger, Reconciliation (pl.)", and it is unclear whether the singular forms a class of one. The Chord Reconciliation Log — which has no connection to temporal reconciliation, being an account of the tuning of the aperture bells — nevertheless records, under the year of the Lammas variance, an entry reading "the ledger of the four hundred and eighth, unresolved, and the ledger of the eight hundred and ninth, unresolved, and the ledger of the fourth hundred and tenth, unresolved" (Chord Reconciliation Log, entry 2,104). This suggests the difficulty was not confined to the one ledger. The Office of Unitary Reconciliation has declined to confirm the point.

Storage and retention

Closed Reconciliation Ledgers are held in the sub-vault of the twelfth aperture, arranged by floor and by year, and may be consulted by any Librarian with a second-seal pass. The concordance is kept by the Office of the Registrar and has not been revised since the aperture was widened. Ledgers awaiting the disposal of the Grey Ledgers are not shelved. The persons consulting the Reconciliation Ledgers are instructed to make no marks in the aperture and to leave their gauntlets in the antechamber.

The Bureau of Affective Ledgers holds a standing request for the transfer of the affective accounts of the Reconciliation Ledgers into the Vex Ledgers, but no transfer has been made. The Bureau has renewed the request every year without comment. The ledger rests open.